Green Options

Sweet! Anyone receive any Climate Change Chocolate this past Valentine’s Day weekend? Well, chocolate bunny season is coming up so you might wanna bookmark this one…

I wrote about the TerraPass carbon offset chocolate offerings on Shaping Youth with a jaundiced eye toward greenwashing, since the main Bloomsberry factory is located in New Zealand, but good news! Bloomsberry chocolate manufacturer CEO Paul Pruett confirmed the TerraPass chocolate that’s sold in the U.S. is produced in the U.S.!

It’s evidently part of their business model to stay local with manufacturing, in addition to the chocolate’s recyclable wrapper and 15 tips for reducing your carbon footprint. Even better? Bloomsberry reports so far they’ve sold enough chocolate bars to offset the equivalent of:

814 passenger vehicles for 1 year
10,333 barrels oil
588 homes for 1 year
31 acres of forest preserved from deforestation
23.2 railcars worth of coal

Kids can earn some green by doing what they love, creating thought-provoking media on climate change!

For the first time ever, kids are ‘burnin’ down the house’ with ideas and innovation to pitch renowned PBS hub WGHB for 3 to 5 minute youth videos on how climate change affects kids’ own community environs, vying for $2000 production grants and potential PBS airing.

WGBH has made it even hotter for green teens by hosting ongoing webinars starting Feb. 3rd to help kids conceptualize, remix, pitch ideas and amass public opinion…(accessible via archive too, so don’t sweat the date)

Popular pioneer vloggers Ryanne Hodson (who I can attest is very generous with her knowledge, as I’ve attended her Media Center how-tos and checked out her book) and Jay Dedman (her partner, former CNN journalist/co-founder of Yahoo’s videoblogging group) will contribute their skill sets to get kids started. Partner org Teachers Domain makes it a cinch for students to get up to speed with factoids and resources too. The inspiration for the contest? The Frontline documentary, “Heat” all about global warming and businesses’ reactions in the court of public opinion contributing to make or break success. Deadline for entries at WBGH is March 15, 2009. Next up on the eco-competitions…

Back to school fundraising hawking giftwrap, magazines and chocolate rubs against the grain of my eco, nutritional, and anti-consumption lifestyle…so what’s a financially strapped school to do?

Enter GreenRaising.com, an all-green gift hub of gorgeous recycled wrap, cool reusable bottles and bags, fair trade chocolate, green school supplies, soaps and lotions, even cleaning supplies!

This fabulous one stop portal imparts an earth-friendly message, while helping financially strapped schools and youth organizations with socially responsible spending. (um, could our government sign up?)

Teachers and parents donning polar bear heads is inherently fun and effective in getting the attention of the K-8 crowd. If you can snag just ONE assembly hour to kick off this grassroots green program for climate change, KIDS can take it from there, bringing home Cool the Earth influences for micro-change into every household.

Social change agents have learned the hard way that adapting kid-friendly programs into ‘core curriculum’ is a time sink, whereas schools embrace participation as ‘enrichment,’ since it’s no hassle for teachers, ‘apolitical,’ and take place in an informal, volunteer environment with programs that are ready to run.

BBC Scotland is leveraging kids’ pension for codes, clues, missions and 007-style in a fun little interactive for young kids 7-9 called The Environmental Intelligence Unit.

In classic “the world needs your help” secret agent mode, the game puts the child in ‘action-hero’ context to take on traffic, pollution and rubbish aligned with the three R’s of reduce, reuse, recycle.

It’s a pretty basic primer to seed core concepts in sustainability, but definitely age appropriate, incorporating factoids and video clips as kids become environmental agents on a mission to ‘find the missing R.’ (spoiler alert: the teacher’s page will fill you in on what that “R” is!)

There are four island missions (house, clear out, school, beach) and if kids engage in all four to obtain the right code words they can receive a final Eco Certificate. (hmnn…I know this is geared more for ‘reach and teach’ tactics, but I could think of some more creative/green awards that might be a better fit than a printout! So ping me, BBC, the idea hamster here will give you some freebie creative director ideas!)

From action steps to green your child’s school to kids actions inspired by green media games and eco-focus, today we’ll continue where we left off in Part One of our Eco Child’s Play Green Media Mini-Series, honoring kids’ green media that embeds positive cues and meaningful play, and turning that inspiration into action.

At left is Dizzywood’s celebration of Wildwood Glen’s reforestation, where kids planted 15,000 trees in online to offline eco-parity, partnering with The Arbor Day Foundation. I’ve added a slew of other tree-planting ideas and sites at the end of this piece to get ready for 9-22-08, worldwide Tree Planting Day coming up in the next couple weeks. In keeping with the green media theme of hope, promise and eco-renewal…here’s more from my interview with Scott Arpajian, Co-Founder of preteen virtual world, Dizzywood…

Even though I spend a lot of time championing the outdoors as the ultimate green play time, greening kids’ minds with environmental stewardship happens online daily.

From greening your electronics to green gaming and havens for the budding naturalist, there are plenty of online to offline bridges to walk if you put on the right hiking shoes.

I love kid-lit and fabulous tree tales like A Forest of Stories and The Giving Tree is still my favorite book of all time…but paper free, online media like Dizzywood’s virtual world of collaborative play prove eco-literacy can transpire on a screen too…In Web 2.0 live-chat, 3-D immersive, fun!

Last week at the massive Virtual Worlds Expo in L.A., Dizzywood’s virtual critters and cuties turned some heads learning that kids’ reforestation efforts online enabled 15,000 REAL trees to be planted off line, thanks to their eco-partnership with the Arbor Day Foundation! Created for preteens 8-12 and Privo  Safety Seal tested with accolades out the wazoo, Dizzywood is thankfully, NOT an anomaly…Check out these OTHER eco-positive picks that prove green media is not an oxymoron!

Future Marine Biologist? Future Environmental Engineer? Future Eco-Savior? Earth Warrior? EcoKid? Planet Patrol? Green Teen? Captain Crunch? ECP readers and Idea hamsters rev your brainpower to gear up for a FREE baby “Treehugger” onesie/tee!

These fun GirlMogul.com tees are a refreshing alternative to the rampant retail ‘pink think’ and “So Sexy So Soon” flash-n-trash that’s predominant in Packaging Girlhood as of late.

GirlMogul’s aspirational identity-wear offers positive personas that are Shaping Youth in favorable ways… I’m sold!

“We believe in encouraging girls’ dreams. You won’t find any princess messages here; just positive, encouraging messages…Future Leader of the Free World, Future CEO, Future Zoologist, Future Brain Surgeon”…

Quite a refreshing change from the snarky tidbits of consumerist tripe with the ‘shop ‘til you drop’ mentality I’ve come across with back to school shopping lately, eh?! Seems like they could use a few more eco-focused nudges toward going green, so I contacted founder Andrea Stein to pitch her the idea of encouraging ECP readers to create the phrase THEY’D most like to see on a tee-shirt…Here’s our mini-interview:

What’s an eco-friendly family to do up against mega-million dollar marketing when brand-identity rears its head?

Once upon a time I could hit the local Outrageous Outgrowns, Zwaggle and haggle online for eco-friendly finds, or find green parenting ways to make a difference by showing how to host a kids’ clothing swap among my pals.

But when kids get a bit older and media peer pressure kicks in, tweens and teens are ripe for consumption junction mall rat mentality, sometimes even calling gently used items ‘gross,’ or being turned off by wearing their own friends’ castoffs in a swap-n-shop format…

So how do you effectively combat commercialism and turn brand influence on itself?

I interviewed a friend of mine who works in public health about breastfeeding being baby’s first natural immunization, in the hopes of sorting out perceptions and realities when it comes to germs, diseases, and vaccines from a ‘green’ perspective…

AJ: We’ve all heard doctors explain how breast milk protects newborns via antibodies, proteins and immune cells, but rather than deep dive into the science of secretory IgA molecules, I’m going to ask a simple ‘Earth mom’ question…Is breastfeeding enough of a ‘human vaccine?’

R: ‘Breast is best’ to boost immunity from infections, reduce respiratory illnesses…But breastfeeding ONLY offers limited protection from serious diseases like measles, pneumonia, and whooping cough.

Breastfeeding works synergistically with immunizations, boosting the levels of protection against disease to actually increase the protection your baby gets. ALL ingredients in vaccines serve a purpose, whether it’s triggering a child’s immune response, or keeping them germ free. Even though we’ve eradicated some diseases in this country before, our mobile society makes it easy to have them come right back over on a plane…‘Herd protection’ only goes so far.